On November 28, the Washington Post reported that during the first open boat strike, which occurred on September 2 after U.S. surveillance aircraft shadowed the craft and intelligence analysts in various command centers were confident the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs, Secretary Hegseth gave the order to “kill everybody.”SEAL Team Six operators stationed on the island of Trinidad fired a surface-to-surface missile, which hit the small boat. For a few minutes the watch teams monitored the blazing wreck, and as the smoke cleared they saw that two of the 11 onboard had survived the initial missile hit and were clinging to the side of the boat.At that point, Admiral Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, the commander overseeing the operation from U.S. Special Operations Command headquarters in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, reportedly told people on the secure conference call that the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo, according to two people. He ordered the second strike to fulfill Hegseth’s directive that everyone must be killed.After initially denying that the Washington Post’s reporting was accurate, the White House walked that back and shifted to a dynamic that attempted to distance Secretary Hegseth from any charge of ordering a war crime, instead laying responsibility at the feet of Admiral Bradley.While Hegseth has repeatedly posted on social media that he has the back of active duty service members, this appears to be an this an to throw the veteran Navy SEAL admiral under the bus to protect the Secretary of “War” against action that could remove him from his cabinet position.